A big PTE just landed. For those of you who are new, the PTE is the public test environment where Uber allow the community to try out changes ahead of them going live. Check out our guide for more information. Feedback for Uber should be left in the official thread for classic or TITANS.

If you spend most of your time playing against the AI then you’re in for a treat, because not only are there a host of AI improvements in this PTE, there’s also a big new feature: you can force the AI to spawn on a different planet from you if the system supports it. So if you’ve been wanting to force a slower opening and more orbital play, now you can.

This PTE has a big focus on isolating and fixing any crash issues that have been identified or reported since TITANS went live, so if you’ve been having a problem give it a whirl and see if that problem still exists.

If you’re a Linux user then this PTE has a fix for the menu issue.

Balance

Helios

Orbital teleports are inactive for a few seconds after entering orbit.

AI

Update to the neural network for Classic mode.

Toned down the AI’s nuke happy nature.

The AI should always be expanding its economy.

The AI now has a shutdown path to clean stuff up better.

AI will now create and destroy planet managers as needed.

Adjusted AI commander behavior a bit to keep it from doing nothing.

Improved the way the AI updates planet manager statuses.

Improved the way the AI calculates its main economy planet.

Improved the perf overhead of updating AI base deploy data.

Added some new cheap build conditions to test for platoon build items before we do the more costly canFindPlaceToAttack.

AI perf improvements to finding a place to attack.

AI should be less flippy floppy about what fabbers are assisting.

Improved AI Land and Orbital interplanetary assistance calculations.

Improved the way the AI chooses where to expand.

AI will build a bit more defenses.

AI should no longer attempt to build Halleys, Catalysts, or Ragnaroks if an ally already has one or more of them on the planet.

AI will now use the average max range for keeping targets at range.

This will help the AI keep as much DPS as possible in range of the target.

Fix for the AI getting stuck not sending out attacks due to the AI’s factory rally point being inside wreckage.

The AI will now disband units into the general squad.

Improved AI stuck detection for air based platoons.

More work on fixing issues preventing the AI from sending attacks.

Minor fixes to AI threat response.

Fix for issue in the AI where the recon gone state was not being handled.

Added an AI placement buffer value to the Ragnarok.

AI will no longer build the Ragnarok or the land/air titans on asteroids.

Added threat checks for the Orbital and Structure titan build items.

Fix for AI not clearing build items when a factory dies.

Fix for AI commander getting stuck if it was in danger as it teleported.

Added landing zone options to the AI in the lobby

If a system allows multi-planet spawns, you can force the AI to spawn on the same planet as a player, or on a planet with no players.

If the conditions are impossible, the AI will ignore the restrictions.

The option should only appear if the planet supports multi planet spawns.

Fix for AI checking Support Commander affordability against the advanced bot fabber.

Galactic War

Fixes for orbital unit damage upgrades in galactic war

Pathing

Units that are sent as a single interplanetary move order arrive spread out.

If a user made a mod that issued unique move orders across an entire planet it’d work fine and there’d be nothingwe could do to stop it.

Distribution isn’t even because createCelestialMoveTask is called before all units are added to the order. But it’s good enough for now.

orbital_arrival_radius and orbital_arrival_unit_radius are defined in nav.json. They can be tweaked to fudge things around.

Performance

AI influence map perf improvements.

Added a draw call limit to the virtual texture processing.

Helps limit the amount of time spent rendering virtual texture pages.

Also helps reduce the amount of memory allocated to virtual texturing in texture buffers.

More nav perf improvements, mainly in sweep waves.

System Editor

Editing landing zones will also lock in the position of metal spots (that way they will not be repositioned after you finish editing the landing zones).

UI

Added restrictions to the bounty mode modifier. Values must be within [0.1, 1.0]

Added kickstarter backer name to credits list and their planets names to the planet list.

Fix issue where planes that begin a new move order after moving over CSG would do a slow vertical take off rather than move forward.

Fix a crash that could occur on save/load due to uninitialized memory.

Fix some bad perf situations on client.

Fix for unnecessary nav overhead on the client.

Fix for uv scrolling behavior on units. Now materials are only updated when the unit is moving.

Fix for AI crash in transport to planet task if a planet gets destroyed during the loading step.

Added “anti_entity_targets_units” to weapon specs to speed up anti-entity weapons that do not target units.

Refactored auto repair task to speed it up a bit.

Shared armies will no longer self destruct after 10 minutes if one of the players disconnects. The army will only self destruct if all the players in the shared army disconnect.

Orbital Teleporter work:

Update orbital teleporter to use new inCircle function that evenly distributes points across area

Wondible Discoveries

There is a new stock mod for PAX. It seems to require a manually launched local server (I assume they had an infinite loop which restarted as soon as it finished) It has it’s own ui_mod_list.js and won’t work with regular UI mods. Even with them off, I get stuck on Loading Solar System.

Been subject to any nagging issues following the release of TITANS? Well there’s a hotfix out now to resolve those report by players to Uber. It also has some small AI updates, and a few balance tweaks including a nerf to the Squall.

If you’re running the PTE, well you don’t need to any more as stable is now the most up-to-date branch. The official thread for this update can be found here for TITANS and here for Classic.

Balance

Solar Drone (Icarus)

Underwater Vision decreased to 50 from 500

Nuke Tank (Manhattan)

Armor Damage Orbital increased to 0.33 from 0.0

Armor Damage Commander set to 0.33

Drone Carrier (Typhoon)

Ammo Demand decreased to 15 from 30

Missile Drone (Squall)

Metal Cost increased to 90 from 30 (Only will affect repair speed)

Health Regen decreased to -3 from -1

Acceleration decreased to 80 from 90

Move Speed decreased to 80 from 90

Turn Speed decreased to 240 from 270

AI

Updated Classic land neural net data.

Titans land neural net update

Titans air neural net update

Galactic War

Galactic War Titan cards will now properly interact with the orbital and air titan, and will not show up in Classic PA

Bugfix/Polish

Fix for crash when loading a save or resuming a game where an entity spawned and died on the same tick.

Fix for a crash in closestPointPlane

Fix for a crash caused by units trying to initialize a celestial move task after their planet has been blown up but before the unit has been destroyed.

When launching PA Classic on Steam when you own TITANS, the Quit & Install / Quit & Launch buttons on the popup now initiate the install or launch for you.

Fix for AI crash on shutdown in the interplanetary request system

Fix for a crash in BuildTask

Fix for a crash when loading a save with a unit with a celestial body and no order.

Fix for a crash when SimWeapon is verifying index in one place and not in another

Make main.css rules a little more specific

Fix some cursors on certain Linux drivers

Sim units no longer kill the server if spawned with an invalid spec id.

Shut down empty load_save servers.

Set +x bit on published Linux files that need it. Fixes the Linux download not working out of the box

Fix default parameters to panel.move.

Fix for boolean inversion in the build task when creating the unit.

Added a ‘no-gpu’ option to the panel api. This allows us to reduce the number of processes and interacting with the gpu. Enabling software-ui has been know to solve certain ui crashes, and this offers a more balanced solution.

Titans should no longer teleport

Never automatically set particle data format as PositionWithAlpha. The format is almost never used, and when it is it’s usually by mistake and causes something to break.

Events for enemy units will no longer be treated as your events. This bug was most noticeable with the idle fabber/factory widget

It’s our biggest prize pool yet with $600 up for grabs. It’s a deep pool too, monetary prizes for the first seven places in the tournament. You don’t need to be the best to be in with a chance to win something, but rise to the top and $300 can be yours. See the sidebar for full details on the prize distribution.

This is a swiss style tournament. 64 players can participate in six rounds, no one gets knocked out, you get a game every round. New to swiss? As the rounds advance the swiss system calculates a score based on your results and the seeding of your opponents. The deeper into the tournament you go the more well matched your opponents will be. It’s a tournament designed to give you better and better matches as you go on.

So TITANS has been out for a week and it has been a bit of a learning curve. I know that when I first encountered the changes to the fabber rates I suddenly had no idea what made for a good opening any more.

Well worry not, because PAG_Elodea has your back. Those of you who followed Planetary Annihilation might be aware of PAG_Elodea’s Cookie Cutter series. As one of the top 1v1 players of the game he’s made a series of videos on good opening build orders, and the fundamentals of Planetary Annihilation play.

He’s now released a new build order video for TITANS players. If you’ve been struggling to find the right balance for your opening, then check it out.

So you’ve got your teeth into TITANS and that’s great. We’re seeing much higher player numbers across both classic and TITANS, and over in TITANS T2 has become a normal part of 1v1 play. It’s all very exciting.

The focus of this patch is on crushing a number of bugs which have been reported. For TITANS players there’s also an adjustment to the capabilities of the Squall, which should serve to limit the (some might say overwhelming) danger the Typhoon represents.

AI

Galactic War

Galactic War Titan cards will now properly interact with the orbital and air titan, and will not show up in Classic PA

Bugfix/Polish

Fix for crash when loading a save or resuming a game where an entity spawned and died on the same tick.

Fix for a crash in closestPointPlane

Fix for a crash caused by units trying to initialize a celestial move task after their planet has been blown up but before the unit has been destroyed.

When launching PA Classic on Steam when you own TITANS, the Quit & Install / Quit & Launch buttons on the popup now initiate the install or launch for you.

Fix for AI crash on shutdown in the interplanetary request system

Fix for a crash in BuildTask

Fix for a crash when loading a save with a unit with a celestial body and no order.

Fix for a crash when SimWeapon is verifying index in one place and not in another

Make main.css rules a little more specific

Fix some cursors on certain Linux drivers

Sim units no longer kill the server if spawned with an invalid spec id.

Shut down empty load_save servers.

Set +x bit on published Linux files that need it. Fixes the Linux download not working out of the box

Fix default parameters to panel.move.

Fix for boolean inversion in the build task when creating the unit.

Added a ‘no-gpu’ option to the panel api. This allows us to reduce the number of processes and interacting with the gpu. Enabling software-ui has been know to solve certain ui crashes, and this offers a more balanced solution.

Titans should no longer teleport

Never automatically set particle data format as PositionWithAlpha. The format is almost never used, and when it is it’s usually by mistake and causes something to break.

Events for enemy units will no longer be treated as your events. This bug was most noticeable with the idle fabber/factory widget

Planetary Annihilation: TITANS has launched. On the day we hosted a livestream and ran a number of public games. We had an opportunity to interview the Project Leads, Tom Vinita and Steve Thompson of Uber Entertainment. We asked them about the design considerations, the process, the changes, and of course, what their favourite unit was.

We’d like to apologise in advance for the noise during the interview. We were speaking to them literally an hour after the launch, so they’d been rather busy and we didn’t get much time for a proper soundcheck.

We also hosted a number of public games that day to celebrate the launch of Planetary Annihilation: TITANS. Check them out on the videos page. And have a look at Planetary Annihilation: TITANS article which details all the changes in this expansion.

So PA: TITANS is out, but what the hell is all this new stuff? If you’ve got a little Godde inside you and desperately need to see all the stats then you have a couple of options.

First is Unit Database, a mod which adds an option to the main menu allowing you to view all the stats for every unit in the game. It’s always current as it pulls the information straight from your game files.

Sometimes though you want to view that stuff without being in Planetary Annihilation. Well, good news, because PADB just got updated. It has has all the TITANS goodness for you to check out. So, get over there and start posting those balance suggestions based on no play time whatsoever! You know you want to.

There has been a mystery brewing at Uber and a lot of people have been guessing as to what it might be. New units? New balance? New terrain? Hover units? More orbital?

No one guessed it would be all of that and more.

Introducing Planetary Annihilation Titans, a standalone expansion for Planetary Annihilation. Available to all Kickstarter backers for free and to any Planetary Annihilation owner for 66% off. It’s a new dawn for Planetary Annihilation.

We here at eXodus eSports were fortunate enough to gain early access to Planetary Annihilation: TITANS. To help you on your journey we’ve put together an article which tells you everything you need to know about Planetary Annihilation: TITANS. It will walk you through the changes, the units, the maps, and our own experiences with it all.

SPOILER: it’s impossibly awesome.

But what of Mystery Mayhem? It will be played using Planetary Annihilation: TITANS. But what if you don’t own a copy? Well we’re happy to announce that everyone who is signed up to the tournament will receive a copy of Planetary Annihilation: TITANS absolutely free courtesy of Uber Entertainment. That’s right, not only do you get to participate in this awesome event with all this cool new stuff, but you’re getting a copy of the expansion just for taking part.

We’ll be playing with Planetary Annihilation: TITANS balance, units and maps so you better start getting ready for this new era of Planetary Annihilation. And if you’re still on the fence after reading our article, well why not come watch live on Saturday and see for yourself?

One of the questions asked in today’s Ask Jables 3 Questions was regarding updates to the Planetary Annihilation ladder

PRoeleert: will you guys do improvements to the ranking system in near future? Revise timeouts / let people see full rankings?

jables: we have designs for making it more robust, but i don’t think you’ll see it in the next few months, as the guy working on that is buried in other items currently 🙁

This led to a further discussion of the ladder and the best way to encourage play, a subject I have covered in some depth. A suggestion was made to increase the inactivity period from seven to fourteen days. Jables popped away, and by the time he returned it had been done through the power of Uber engineering magic.

So, enjoy a little more flexibility in your requirement to play on the ladder before you disappear.

If you want to participate in the daily jables question time then just pop in to PA Chat sometime between 17:00 and 20:00 UTC. PA Chat has been updated. Courtesy of mikeyh:

single listing in rooms for multiple logins (PA / PALOBBY, etc)

1v1 rank league images fade over time once you go inactive

web icon for people logged in outside of PA

revised help system:

shows only commands available to current user

specific help for PA vs PA Lobby

rank and web status in friends list

right click to clear red mention when minimised

improved command error messages

major refactor of internals

To Do:

(re)join buttons when room is closed (I still misspell halcyon at least once a week)

/setcolor and /resetcolors

/leftalign

show last ranked match info

uber session timeout handling

title bar command links when space available eg /help or /live

fix ghost tooltips when user list updates

enable friend requests when logged into PA Lobby

html help (maybe)

After some more testing the PA Chat code will be ready to split out of PA Stats into a separate client mod that will share identical code with PA Lobby.

After an extensive PTE period the asteroids update has arrived and has brought a raft of bugfixes with it too. There are AI improvements, UI scaling, mult-planet Galactic War makes a return, the AMD brightness bug has been beaten, and much more.

But let’s talk about the asteroids. Some systems (and you can add them to your systems) will have an outer ring of asteroids. You set minimum and maximum numbers and control their spawn times, because more will appear over time. And this all hooks into a change in planet smashing. Gone are craters and guesstimating your impact zone, and we return to the original method of world enders where a smash destroys everything, even the planet now. Keep your eyes on the stars because if one of these rocks appears and you’re not contesting it then you’re as good as dead.

Asteroids

The asteroid belt spawns in small asteroids at a predetermined timing that can be set by the system designer

An alert plays when an asteroid appears in the system

Asteroids have been added to the Roc, Styx, and Medea systems. The Roc system has also been added to the list of Ranked systems

Balance

AA Missile splash damage

Commander decreased from 25 to 10

AA Vehicle (Spinner) decreased from 20 to 10

Air Defense (Galata) decreased from 20 to 10

Missile Ship (Stingray) decreased from 25 to 10

Planets now explode when they collide with one another

This means that the player no longer targets a spot on the target planet

This also means that all commanders on the planet are the first to die and die at the same time

Planets in motion go directly to the target after first going around the sun once

AI

Fix for the AI using the wrong value when making a planet wide patrol order on a gas giant

Fix for crash due to bad data in AI unit map

Fix for AI trying to create an artillery platoon when a Unit Cannon is built

Fix for AI failing to build if the factory it wants to start with cannot be built due to the spec not being available

AI should waste resources less often

Added support for AIs to have multiple personality tags

Fixed a bug where the AI would not build an advanced vehicle fabber on planets with an enemy on it

Fixed bug where a fabber would not be built right away on a planet where the AI had an orbital fabber

Fix for AI not setting up initial army presences correctly

Improved AI econ handling

Fix for AI fabbers constantly starting and stopping assisting

Fix for bug in planetmanager that could cause the AI to not create a new base for a spawned in unit when it should

Minor AI build condition update

Fix for AI crash during sim shutdown

Minor AI build item change

AI will try to stick to the same enemy as a target unless a significant reason exists to change

Minor AI platoon behavior modifications

Fix for AI orbital radar platoons

Added stuck detection to the disband behavior of AI platoons in an attempt to keep them from getting lost by the AI

AI should do a better job of scouting other planets

Fix for AI crash that can occur when an AI is defeated

Fix for AI micro and keep at range distances

Further improved AI attack from range behavior

AI can now use asteroids

AI can now handle combat on smaller planets better

AI will launch asteroids at other asteroids, under certain conditions

AI unit cap no longer affects Nukes and Anti-Nukes

Fix for an issue where the AI would not fire nukes in mutli-planet games

Fix for an issue where the AI would send an orbital radar to another planet and it sits there doing nothing

More fixes to the AI platoon distance calculation

Fix for the bug where the AI sometimes would build Nukes/Anti-Nukes and then not have them ever build anything

Minor AI econ balance change

Fix for AI personality_tags having no effect

AI should expand to other planets a bit faster

AI will build more ion cannons

Fix for crash in AI if a transport died immediately after unloading a unit

AI can build Ion Cannons with advanced fabbers

Improved the AI’s orbital game a bit

AI perf improvements

AI will let its metal storage fill up a bit more before using the wasting metal build items

Armory

Restore the display of Kickstarter backer names in the Armory

Fix preferred commander tile state in Armory

Audio

+Sing audio! Give it a try and see what it does

Adding commander footstep sounds

ChronoResume

Disabled the “play from here” button when it would end up before commanders have landed

Galactic War

Fix for GW battles with multiple commanders after save/load/resume

Fix for GW systems not spawning the correct type of systems on harder difficulties

Fix the Revenants minions so they work like everyone else

Graphics

New planet crash effect!

Fix for AMD/ATI brightness bug

Trades brightness for banding

Use –gl-force-mrt-srgb-capable on the command line to turn this behavior back off

It is still uncertain whether this is a driver bug or a pipeline configuration bug. It appears that there is some state that leads to improper blending occurring while filling the diffuse colors in the g-buffer.

Fix for beam particles sometimes not rendering

Fix for particle emitters with the same shader and texture but different facings sometimes not respecting the facing setting

Matchmaking

Fix for an issue where ranked matchmaking was not matching people properly

Fix for an issue where players could not pick their commanders in ranked matches

Changed the schema of holodeck raycast call results to include the currently focused planet

Added Holodeck.focusedPlanet() function call, which returns the currently focused planet

Fix for the misspelling of “maneuver” that was prevalent in the codebase

In WorldView.sendOrder, removed the requirement on location for non-location commands

Added valid stance value documentation for the WorldView.sendOrder

Save/Load

Fix for loading a save where an entity was created and retired on the same tick

Saving the game is no longer enabled during landing & game over states

Fix an issue where the last GW save would not appear in the continue last game spot when you complete a battle and return to main menu

Fix a server crash when rewinding the game and then saving

System Editor

Fix the sliders in the system editor

Fix a bug where the metal planet’s radius could be set lower than the minimum

Fix an issue where a twin CSG could get left behind in the system editor and the user could not delete it

Pathing

Improved the exiting of teleporters

Performance

Fix for area patrol lag

Speed up of distributing points on a planet for planet wide patrols for Air/Orbital units

Minor physics perf improvement

UI

Improved feedback while placing buildings

Build previews now show the placement bounds as a square light

The preview will change yellow if placing the building will block a metal spot

The preview will turn red if building is placed in a spot it cannot be built on

Hovering over wreckage will no longer allow the use command to be the default right-click command

Issuing a terminating order to a unit (which is most orders) will remove all non-terminating orders (Patrol and Assist) from the unit’s order queue

From the GW, you can now quit to the main menu or the GW map. You can no longer quit to desktop from the live game menu

Various GW galaxy visual tweaks

Adjust the postion of outlining stars to keep them inside the galaxy graphic

Changed the starting zoom level to center on the galaxy and fit it too the view, instead of zooming in on the local cluster around the player. This ensures that you can see the galaxy when you first start, and ensures that the commander is in view.

We now have a button that will show the typed password in the lobby. (i.e. it’ll show “hunter2” rather than “*******”.)

Show an informational dialog for machines that do not meet the required specs to play on a local server

Paused game ui shows a small display for user invoked pause, full width pause when invoked by game (resume after save, etc.)

Option exists in settings as “GUI Size”

Players have a slider that allows them to adjust the size of the UI to their liking